As my guide walks me through three millennia of Chinese culture spanning the Sung, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties at Taipei’s historic National Palace Museum, for some odd reason a small chinaware teacup catches my eye. Taking a step closer I look into it and find written in the middle of the cup the Sanskrit letter “Om”! Where did it come from? A Hindu temple in Taiwan?
Travels to the East always throw up such surprises. In the Japanese garden behind Tokyo’s Four Seasons Hotel I once found a stone Trimurti that the hotel staff said was found in the ground below when the hotel was being built. Few Indians and fewer east Asians are today aware of the intimacy of India’s civilisational links with countries to its east, going as far – or as near – as Japan, Korea, Vietnam and Taiwan.
“Taiwan is a melting pot of cultures,” says Tien Hung-mao, president of Taiwan’s Institute for National Policy Research. When Han Chinese from the mainland first crossed the straits and came to the island, they met indigenous tribals whose descendants are now citizens of the Republic of China, that is, Taiwan. Over the centuries, Japanese, Koreans, Polynesians and others settled on the island making Taiwan “a plural democracy like India”, says Dr Tien.
It is not just civilisational links – nor a shared commitment to liberal democracy – that today bind India and Taiwan together as much as galloping trade. India’s bilateral trade with Taiwan grew at a whopping 55 per cent in 2010, followed by a 46 per cent growth in January-May 2011 and is currently estimated over $6 billion. Officials from both countries are confident that with growing government-to-government (G2G) relations, bilateral trade will hit the $10 billion mark next year.
Both governments have commissioned their think tanks – the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research in Taipei and the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations in New Delhi – to study the feasibility of an India-Taiwan free trade agreement (FTA). In the past year, two senior ministers of the Taiwan government led delegations of business leaders and educationists to India to cement closer business-to-business (B2B) and people-to-people (P2P) relations.
Both governments hope that the hurdles erected by idiosyncratic G2G relations will be overcome by stronger B2B and P2P relations with rising trade, foreign direct investment (FDI) and educational exchanges. At the National Taiwan Normal University, I meet Indian students pursuing doctoral degrees in the sciences who vouch for good teaching (mostly in English) and research facilities. Many are also learning Mandarin and the use of chopsticks.
“I attach great importance to good relations with India,” says Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-jeou, expressing hope that an FTA will be signed and bilateral economic relations will continue to grow. “India’s Look East Policy offers a golden opportunity for India-east Asia relations,” he tells me when I call on him at Taipei’s grand Presidential Palace last week.
President Ma explains that Taiwan has moved from “isolation to engagement” by first improving relations with mainland China and then with the “international community”. While Taiwan remains “committed to improving cross-straits relations” (with China), it wishes to “expand relations with the United States, European Union, Japan and India”. President Ma describes this as a “virtuous cycle” — improving relations with China helps Taiwan improve relations with all others, and vice versa.
What is driving Taiwan’s increasing engagement with India? India’s economic rise, without doubt. President Ma acknowledges that Taiwan has greatly benefitted from its economic relations with China, which remains its largest trade partner and destination for Taiwanese FDI. However, China’s economic growth is slowing and Taiwan needs to “de-risk”. It wants to spread its eggs into other baskets and that is where the new approach to India fits in. Taiwan is wary of a deceleration in China’s growth and is looking to India to sustain its export-oriented industry.
In its relations with other Asian countries “Taiwan has a grand strategy”, explains President Ma. It wishes to “institutionalise cross-straits relations” so that there is no scope for any uncertainty in the future and there is no arms race in the region. Any reversal of “current relations” will have a prohibitively high cost for both China and Taiwan, he believes. “This will act as a deterrent to any change in the status quo.”
At the Taiwan Think Tank and the Taiwan Brain Trust, two policy forums of the country’s opposition political party (the Democratic Progressive Party), policy analysts Shih-Chung Liu and I-chung Lai reiterate their party’s commitment to Taiwanese “independence and democracy” and to Taiwan having an “independent foreign policy”. Both note the importance of Taiwan-China economic relations and of stable cross-straits relations but they exude a sense of pride about being Taiwanese.
Curiously, they want to promote greater travel from Taiwan to the rest of Asia, including India. It appears tourism has a strategic dimension for them, so does their cultural pluralism. Indian cinema is gaining popularity and almost everyone I meet has seen Aamir Khan’s 3 Idiots and identifies with the parent-child relationship and the focus on education depicted in the movie.
Two decades after former Prime Minister Narasimha Rao launched India’s “Look East Policy”, the geo-economic dividends are there to see. Having watched Japan, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia and even China log into India’s increasingly open and growing economy, Taiwan, too, has hitched its wagon. There is great potential for increased B2B and P2P contacts between the two countries. Taiwan can also offer a convenient base for Indian companies keen to do business in and with China but is not yet ready to risk locating facilities there.
Today, Taiwan benefits from China’s economic rise, but tomorrow China would benefit from emulating Taiwan’s political pluralism. Democratic Taiwan holds a mirror to communist China’s political future.
The writer visited Taiwan as a guest of the India-Taipei Association
